Will ‘Makers’ Change Shenzhen?

Yang Yang, founder of RPTechWorks, who teaches how to build 3D printers and also sells them, believes that "labor intensive" Shenzhen, China, will eventually become a city known for fast prototyping with "shortened development cycles."

SHENZHEN, China — Most Americans today still picture Shenzhen as the home of iPhone production, migrant workers, and the center of a huge electronics component bazaar.

Well, they're not wrong. That Shenzhen is still here. However, the way people live, work, and play in Shenzhen is changing -- rapidly, as with almost everything in a rapidly evolving Chinese culture.

Huawei, of course, still has those legendary employees who don't think twice about working the whole weekend, sleeping over if necessary, to solve customers' problems.

But there's also a growing number who expect to have their weekends free, Chinese workers who are driven to seek more knowledge and join movements like "chuang ke" (translated as "makers").

Yang Yang, founder of RPTechWorks, has been teaching how to build open-source 3D printers and selling 3D printers since he got first involved in their development at his alma mater, the University of Warwick in the UK.

Yang believes that "labor intensive" Shenzhen will eventually become a city known for fast prototyping with "shortened development cycles." He thinks the Android explosion, the emergence of better 3D print machines, and the media's hyping of 3D printers will all contribute to Shenzhen's transformation.

Qifeng Yan, ex-director of the Nokia Research Center in Shenzhen (closed last year), is also predicting Shenzhen's shift from the world's factory to its global incubator. Yan, now director and chief researcher at Media Lab (Shenzhen) of Hunan University, told us that Media Lab -- currently 15 people -- will have 1,500 researchers in the next 10 years.

Jingfeng Liu, founder of pcDuino, acknowledged that the "maker movement" has arrived here.

But he quickly added, "It's mostly within the education market." Unlike their counterparts in the United States who tend to be older, have real jobs, but are high-end hobbyists or aspiring innovators, Chinese makers tend to be much younger, often still university students, he observed.

Open-source hardware like pcDuino, for example, is popular in China, not among hobbyists, but mostly among professionals who want to "go up the food chain," Liu explained. A company that used to distribute Lenovo PCs, for example, came up with its own Virtual Desktop, based on pcDuino, he said.

Media Lab's Yan noted that many Chinese tend not to have either a garage or any "spare time." So, the maker movement in China is evolving into something different from what it is in the rest of the world. Especially when it's tied into the existing built-in electronics ecosystem in Shenzhen, the maker movement can help local companies to open DIY workshops within organizations to start new projects, or go all the way into startup territory.

The photos in the following pages show a few changes brewing in Shenzhen in the way people live, work, and play.

High-rise buildings

Photo: EE Times/Junko Yoshida

Views of massive high-rise buildings astonish me every time I come here. This photo was taken from my hotel room. Judging from the hanging clothes in balconies, these unusually tall buildings aren't offices. They're apartments, where people actually live.

Looking at home 3d printing is the wrong place. In a same way, while every home has a printer, For most print jobs, even simple ones like flyers and business cards , you used a commercial printer.

But if you look at commercial printers you see a large variety of materials(plastics, metals, organics, food, ceramics, some mixed materials), techniques (from printing point by point to layer by layer), dimensions(from printing aircraft parts and houses, to tiny 100nm stuff) and industries(healthcare, manufacturing , prototyping , aviation, fashion.....) .

Great quote Junko "When I show 3D printer demos, they often say, 'Is that it? Is that all it does?'" While 3D printing is interesting and could be revolutionary in the future there is so much hype about it today I am not surprised that people aren't that impressed when they see it.

I was using 3D printing for models as a grad in the Aerospace industry 15+ years ago, from what I have seen most of the machines available today are just scaled down models of what was available back then. Nice for making models.

There are certainly uses for makers, being able to create prototype cases to wrap around a new device board is great and saves lots of expense having one machined. Need a lot more innovation in 3D printing though.

I guess its very common in the Asian culture to work on the weekends also if there is a demand to finish the work. Indians are also very good in working on weekends or working past 9pm most of the weekdays. People need to learn how to balance work and life. I know its easy to say and so very difficult to follow.

The Maker Faire in Shenzhen is just next month, right? Yep, I think that will be huge, and it will be interesting to find what the ratio is going to be in its attendants between amateur/aspired Maker vs. professionals based in Shenzhen who want to move up the food chain.

The Maker Faire, first held in the San Francisco Bay Area in 2006, is a giant faire for all things creative and fun. There are now many mini and large scale Maker Faires throughout the world. There were 100 last year.

Given the the title of the article, it is appropriate that this year will be Shenzhen's first to host one of the handful of large scale Maker Faires (the last two years they had a mini-Maker Faire).

That's interesting. In the US, I think we have tended not to encourage students to "tinker." Even those who are interested in things like robotics often come to their first meeting having never used a tool...I hope that changes.